Smartphone Energy Drain in the Wild

Abstract

The limited battery life of modern smartphones remains a leading factor adversely affecting the mobile experience of millions of smartphone users. In order to extend battery life, it is critical to understand where and how is energy drain happening on users' phones under normal usage, for example, in a one-day cycle. In this paper, we conduct the first extensive measurement and modeling of energy drain of 1520 smartphone in the wild. We make two primary contributions. First, we develop a hybrid power model that integrates utilization-based models and FSM-based models for different phone components with a novel technique that estimates the triggers for the FSM-based network power model based on network utilization. Second, through analyzing traces collected on 1520 Galaxy S3 and S4 devices in the wild, we present detailed analysis of where the CPU time and energy are spent across the 1520 devices, inside the 800 apps, as well as along several evolution dimensions, including hardware, Android, cellular, and app updates. Our findings of smartphone energy drain in the wild have significant implications to the various key players of the Android phone eco-system, including phone vendors Samsung , Android developers, app developers, and ultimately millions of smartphone users, towards the common goal of extending smartphone battery life and improving the user mobile experience.